Pickled Cucumbers and Radish Pods, 1845

Tidying up the blog before the year ends, and realized I never photographed my final batch of pickles last August. The last historic receipts I tried were Pickled Cucumbers and Pickled Radish Pods, based on the recipes in "Cookery Made Easy" (1845).

What an attractively arranged shelf!

As usual, I followed modern canning processes for safely, but used the historic flavor profiles with allspice, ginger, and black pepper in an all-vinegar pickle. Due to the absurd size all my cucumbers got to this year, I did have to slice them instead of using whole 3" gherkins.

Bonus round! 

Do to the aforementioned 'absurd abundance of huge cucumbers' which was summer 2025, I used the left-over 10 lbs of cucumbers to make a modern bread & butter pickle from the recipe posted by the National Center for Home Food Preservation. As that recipe calls for 6 lbs of cucumbers, I ended up making 1 and 2/3 batches to get them all used up.

This one was a bit different, in that it started by slicing up the cucumbers (10 lbs, cut into 3/16" slices) and onions (5lbs, thinly sliced), adding 5/6 cup salt, then covering them with ice in the fridge for 4 hours. I then got to boil together 6 2/3 cups vinegar, 7.5 cups sugar,  3 Tbsp + 1 tsp mustard seed, 2.5 tsp celery seed, and 1 Tbsp + 2 tsp turmeric for 10 minutes. Hot pack (add drained cucumbers and onions to the pickle, bringing back up to boiling), then put into jars and process ten minutes in the water bath. [The time varies with recipe, jar size and elevation. These instructions said to process pint or quart jars for 10 minutes at elevations up to 1000ft, for 15 min up to 6,000 ft, and for 20 minutes when working above 6,000 ft.]

My 10 lbs of cucumbers yielded 6 quarts of pickles, which is a full load in my water canner. There was actually enough material for a 7th quart jar, but rather than run a second load, I just put the rest into the fridge for refrigerator pickles.

Very exciting jar of pickles!